![]() U.S. steps up scrutiny of American fighters in Syria
BY MARK HOSENBALL WASHINGTON Thu May 22, 2014 5:39pm EDT A Free Syrian Army fighter fires a weapon towards forces loyal to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad, in the town of Morek in Hama province May 22, 2014. CREDIT: REUTERS/BADI KHLIF (Reuters) - The Justice Department has tapped a veteran prosecutor to probe the flow of foreign fighters, including Americans, who are joining Syria's rebels, U.S. officials said, in a sign of heightened alarm over the threat of radicalized militants returning home. The FBI also has formed a special team to identify U.S. citizens traveling to Syria to fight with anti-government groups, and is working with both intelligence and law enforcement agencies to investigate such individuals, a spokesman said. U.S. security agencies have expressed growing anxiety for months about a steady stream of Western militants heading to Syria. Most of the foreigners join up with the most extreme factions trying to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, including Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. U.S. and allied officials say their main fear is that veteran fighters, radicalized by their Syrian experience, will launch terror attacks once they return home. Authorities in Western Europe say they have uncovered plots by fighters returning from Syria. The Justice Department prosecutor assigned to deal with the issue, Stephen Ponticello, works for the department's national security division. The head of that division, John Carlin, said on Thursday that Ponticello will coordinate investigations into foreign fighters, provide expertise, and meet with foreign counterparts in Europe and elsewhere who are dealing with the same threat. "We want to make sure that individuals in the counterterrorism section and the U.S. Attorneys throughout the country are focused on this threat," Carlin said at an event at the Brookings Institution think tank. In late March, the State Department also picked career diplomat Robert Bradtke to deal with the perceived threat. Bradtke will be the lead U.S. diplomat in "engaging foreign partners to prevent and interdict foreign extremist travel to Syria," a department spokeswoman said. Paul Bresson, an FBI spokesman, said his agency had set up a team of experts within its Counterterrorism Division to scout out Americans involved or interested in fighting in Syria. Historically, he said, "travel to locations such as Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, have been of particular concern due to the terrorist groups operating in those regions." But now "Syria has emerged as an area of great concern due to the ongoing conflict and extremist activity in the region," he added. Until recently, U.S. intelligence officials had estimated that around 7,000 foreigners have since 2012 joined about 23,000 anti-government rebels fighting with the most militant anti-Assad groups. On Wednesday, however, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the estimate now stands at 9,000 foreign fighters who have traveled to Syria since the war started. She described U.S. allies in the Middle East and Europe as "gravely concerned" by the threat from their citizens traveling to Syria. Psaki declined to estimate how many Americans have gone to Syria to fight. U.S. officials say that several dozen U.S. citizens or residents have traveled to Syria to fight with anti-government groups. Hundreds of others from the United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and other countries whose citizens are afforded easy entry to the United States also have fought in Syria, U.S. and European officials say. U.S. authorities already have indicted a handful of individuals for alleged involvement in the Syrian conflict, often on charges of providing material support to militant groups. At least one U.S. citizen, Michigan native Nicole Mansfield, was killed in Syria last year, reportedly while fighting with anti-Assad forces. (Additional reporting by Aruna Viswanatha.; Editing by Warren Strobel, Paul Simao andAndre Grenon) _________________________________________ ![]() January 14, 2014
OUTRAGE: Obama Seeks to Bring 30,000 Syrian Muslim “Refugees” to US, Waive Counterterrorism Laws By Debbie Schlussel Remember when Barack Obama told a French TV Channel that the U.S. is a “Muslim nation”? Well, he’s working hard to improve the demography to make it so. The Obama Administration is seeking to bring 30,000 “vulnerable” Syrian refugees to the United States by the end of 2014 and will waive counterterrorism laws and allow those Syrians who aided and abetted Islamic terrorists, including Al-Qaeda, into the country. And these “vulnerable” Hezbollah- and Al-Qaeda-supporting Syrians will be permanently resettled here, as in green card, citizenship, billions in entitlements, and the whole tisa[Arabic for "nine"] yards. The New “Americans” . . . Courtesy of President Obama This is a punch in the gut to America, especially to the families of the victims of the 9/11 Al-Qaeda Islamic terrorist attacks and our soldiers who were maimed or murdered in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just sickening! And they have the NERVE to call these Syrians “vulnerable”? HUH? Um, aren’t we Americans the vulnerable ones, since we will have to deal with these intolerant savages imposing themselves and their ways on us and our country? Just askin’. A U.S. official stated publicly for the first time this week that some of the 30,000 especially vulnerable Syrians the United Nations hopes to resettle by the end of 2014 will be referred to the U.S. for resettlement. . . . About 20 countries, mostly in Europe, have agreed to take 18,000 Syrians, according to United Nations High Commission for Refugees, or UNHCR, the agency charged with referrals. So, let me get this straight: TWENTY countries in Eurabia are taking in 18,000 of these savages, and the U.S. must take in THIRTY-FRICKING-THOUSAND???!!! And while this story claims U.S. officials are agreeing to take in “some” of the 30,000, the stories I’ve heard from immigration people in the federal government is that we are taking in at least 30,000. The U.S. has not set a specific target for how many refugees it will resettle. But at a Senate hearing Tuesday, State Department Assistant Secretary Anne Richard said, “We expect to accept referrals for several thousand Syrian refugees in 2014.” Um, there is a reason this idiotette Richard isn’t saying how many and just gives the nebulous “several thousand” number. In fact, it’s tens of thousands. Post-9/11 immigration laws designed to keep out terrorists have had the unintended consequence of ensnaring some innocent people. For example, some of the provisions treat providing food or services to rebels—even those supported by the U.S.—as “material support” to terrorism. Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.), a key proponent of refugee resettlement, said the “overly broad” provisions would prevent a Syrian who gave a cigarette or a sandwich to a Free Syrian Army soldier from coming to the U.S. as a refugee. Molly Groom, acting deputy secretary for the Office of Immigration and Border Security at the Department of Homeland Security, acknowledged that “broad definitions” of terrorist activity under U.S. law were “often a hurdle to resettling otherwise eligible refugees who pose no security threat.” She said agencies were consulting to develop exemptions for the Syrians. In recent years, DHS and the State and Justice Departments have exercised their authority to offer exemptions to some applicants WTF?! If you give food and services to Islamic terrorists you are indeed providing material support to terrorists. To waive these laws is absurd. But we don’t keep records of or know who gave a cigarette or sandwich to Al-Qaeda. These waivers will go to those who did far more. Why don’t we just open the gates and say, “Hey, Al-Qaeda, come on in!” If you provided wires and explosives, “Welcome to America, Habibi!” They will sponsor and bring their relatives and friends here and on and on and on. It’s a total disaster with never-ending ripples. And, by the way, this is IN ADDITION to thethousands of Syrian Muslims here on student visas to whom Obama already gave Protected Status, including the ability to stay here indefinitely (basically for life) and to work. Say good-bye, America. This isn’t the great country we used to know. And it never will be again. And with moves like these and massive amnesty, it will change drastically for the worse. The end of America is coming sooner than you think. BTW, I would be remiss if I didn’t note that President Bush and his administration were just as guilty of this crap. He claimed the war in Iraq was victorious and successful, and, yet, he brought more than 100,000 Iraqi refugees–most of them Muslim, some of them terrorists,honor killers, and child molesters–to America. Under Bush and Obama, Muslim immigration to America doubled in the ten years after 9/11. And that’s why America’s Muslim population and the number of mosques on U.S. soil doubled. What a great strategy: blow 3,000 Americans up, and you are rewarded with non-stop golden tickets to invade the place irreparably. And don’t hold your breath for Republicans to do anything to stem the tide. They haven’t. And they won’t. ___________________________________________ Sept 22nd
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![]() UPDATE 2-U.S. says works with partners to raise pressure on Syria on chemical arms Fri Jan 31, 2014 10:04pm GMT (Adds comments from senior U.S. official In paragraphs 13-19) By Matt Spetalnick and Lesley Wroughton Jan 31 (Reuters) - The White House said on Friday it was working with partners to ratchet up pressure on Syria to accelerate removal of its chemical weapons after the United States accused it of deliberately stalling an international disarmament deal. The Obama administration stepped up criticism of President Bashar al-Assad's government as Secretary of State John Kerry met Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Munich amid a U.S. push for Moscow to do more to win cooperation from its ally Damascus. Russia earlier rejected U.S. charges that Syria is dragging its feet on giving up chemical weapons, saying that a June 30 deadline to destroy Assad's arsenal of toxic agents remains viable despite delays. "Syria must immediately take the necessary actions to comply with its obligations," White House spokesman Jay Carney said at a briefing in Washington. "We all know that the Syrian regime has the capability to move these weapons," Carney said. "We're going to continue to work with our partners on this to keep up the pressure on the Assad regime." But Carney stopped short of threatening any specific action if Syria did not get chemical weapons deliveries on track. Asked what the consequences would be if Syria did not take action, he said: "The United States and our partners in this effort will insist that Syria meet its commitments." Assad's decision in September to give up chemical arms helped him avoid threatened U.S. air strikes in retaliation for a poison gas attack near Damascus in August that killed hundreds of people, many of them women and children. President Barack Obama this week touted the chemical weapons agreement as one of the few U.S. diplomatic achievements on Syria, but the State Department said on Thursday just 4 percent of Syria's deadliest chemical agents has been shipped out of the country for destruction at sea. The United States has few good choices to force Assad to comply. Americans are weary of war and Congress is unlikely to go along with any new military engagement in the Middle East. RUSSIAN ALLY Russia has been Assad's most powerful diplomatic backer during the nearly three-year-old conflict in Syria that has killed 130,000, using its veto power in the U.N. Security Council to block Western-backed efforts to push him from power or impose sanctions. But even as Moscow defends Syria over the chemical weapons issue, it runs the risk of diplomatic embarrassment if the international community broadly deems Assad to be in violation of a deal Russia brokered in the first place. Underscoring U.S. efforts to get Russia to use its influence with Assad, a senior U.S. official said Wendy Sherman, a top State Department diplomat, met Russian officials in Moscow on Wednesday to discuss delays in chemical weapons shipments. The chemical weapons dispute unfolded in the final stages of a first round of Syrian peace talks that ended in Geneva on Friday with no progress toward ending the nearly civil war. "There is a credibility issue for the Syrian government whether it be with respect to chemical weapons or implementing any deal reached in Geneva if we do get to a deal," the senior official said. "It is time for the Syrian government to show its seriousness of purpose and begin to move the materials from the 12 sites so they can be transported out of Syria and destroyed." The official declined to say whether the United States might resort to seeking U.N. Security Council approval for punitive action under Chapter 7 of the U.N. charter if Syria continues to defy the chemical weapons agreement. The council adopted a resolution in September that demanded eradication of Syria's chemical weapons but, at Russia's insistence, did not threaten new sanctions or a military response if Assad broke the deal. A second council decision would be needed for that, giving Moscow a chance to nix it. But the U.S. official said of the Chapter 7 option, "If we have to go down that route, we will go down that route." (Additional reporting by Mark Felsenthal; Editing by James Dalgleish and Mohammad Zargham) __________________________________________ ![]() Seymour Hersh: Obama Told Half-Truth on Syria's Chemical Weapons
Monday, 09 Dec 2013 12:42 PM By Courtney Coren President Barack Obama told a half-truth in September when he went before the nation to make the case for why the United States needed to respond militarily to the use of chemical weapons in Syria, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh alleges. "In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts," Hersh wrote in the London Review of Books. "Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the U.S. intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country's civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a U.N. study concluded — without assessing responsibility — had been used in the rocket attack." The Obama administration has responded to Hersh's allegations, saying that they are "simply false," said Shawn Turner, spokesman for the director of National Intelligence,USA Today reports. Hersh explained that according to a report included in the Operations Order — a document put together by U.S. intelligence prior to a ground invasion — evidence is included "that the al-Nursa Front, a jihadi group affiliated with al-Qaida, had mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity." Hersh alleges that the Obama administration "cherry-picked" the intelligence it cited in favor of blaming Syrian President Bashar Assad for the use of sarin gas, when it should have included al-Nursa in its list of suspects. "We know the Assad regime was responsible," Obama said in a speech he gave Sept. 10. "In the days leading up to Aug. 21, we know that Assad's chemical weapons personnel prepared for an attack near an area where they mix sarin gas. They distributed gas masks to their troops. Then they fired rockets from a regime-controlled area into 11 neighborhoods that the regime has been trying to wipe clear of opposition forces. "I determined that it is in the national security interests of the United States to respond to the Assad regime's use of chemical weapons through a targeted military strike," he added. Hersh argues that Obama was about to go to war against Syria because Assad had apparently crossed the "red line" by using chemical weapons, but he was about to do so without verifying who it really was that had used the chemical weapons on the Aug. 21 attack. According to the Hersh, there was a lot of frustration and even anger over what those in the intelligence and military community viewed as a "deliberate manipulation of intelligence" by the administration. "One high-level intelligence officer, in an email to a colleague, called the administration's assurances of Assad's responsibility a 'ruse,'" Hersh wrote. "The attack 'was not the result of the current regime', he wrote." "A former senior intelligence official told me that the Obama administration had altered the available information — in terms of its timing and sequence" to make it look like the administration had captured intelligence in "real time," Hersh explained. "The same official said there was immense frustration inside the military and intelligence bureaucracy: 'The guys are throwing their hands in the air and saying, 'How can we help this guy' — Obama — 'when he and his cronies in the White House make up the intelligence as they go along?'" The officials said that Obama made it sound like the government had received an advance warning that the attack was going to take place before it did, but that wasn't the case, the officials claim. The United States has set up "a secret sensor system inside Syria" that is watched by the National Reconnaissance Office to alert the government in case there is any "movement of chemical warheads stored by the military." Hersh explains that for sarin gas to be used, it can only be prepared a few days in advance, as it will start to eat away at the warhead. However, there was no movement detected in the days leading up to the Aug. 21 attack. A possible alternative explanation is that the warheads were supplied to the Syrian army from somewhere else. The administration is continuing to stand by its claim that Assad was responsible for the August attack. "The intelligence clearly indicated that the Assad regime and only the Assad regime could have been responsible for the 21 August chemical weapons attack," Turner said. "The suggestion that there was an effort to suppress intelligence about a nonexistent alternative explanation is simply false." One of Hersh's best-known investigative works broke the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal during the Iraq War in 2004 in The New Yorker. The New Yorker and The Washington Post passed on Hersh's Syria story before he asked the London Review of Books to publish it, according to The Huffington Post. Cajoling![]() Thank you Kent Lamberson About Face![]() Thank you Kent Lamberson Unborn Babies, Chemicals and Syria
![]() THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2013
Unconnected dots: Rep. Wasserman heartbroken by Syrian child victims… supports chemical abortion? by Lauren Enriquez Unborn Babies, Chemicals and Syria In a CNN debate on September 4- the eve of today’s vote on Syria authorization – Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida argued with Republican Congressman Michael Burgess about the need for American intervention in the Syrian civil war. U.S. intervention is being considered because Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad is being suspected of having used chemical weapons on his own people. These people were civilians, and among them were hundreds of young children. The civil war has also created two million refugees, half of whom are children, according to the United Nations, who are calling these million children a “lost generation.” In a poignant summary of her opinion that U.S. involvement is necessary, the congresswoman said the following: As a mother, to me, I have an indelible searing imprint on my mind after seeing the pictures of those babies lined up. We have a moral responsibility to respond.It is an unimaginable tragedy and utter injustice that hundreds of Syrian children appear to have died at the hands of the man who is designated to look out for their welfare. Wasserman Shultz overlooked fundamental flaw in her argument when she observed America’s moral responsibility to respond: Wasserman Shultz has spent her career ensuring that chemical and other forms of death continue to be protected by law and carried out on the babies in her own country. You see, Wasserman Shultz has an extended track record of voting against the rights of American children by working to further abortion and research rights that endanger and ensure the end of millions of innocent young lives. She has voted in favor of destructive embryonic stem cell research. She has voted against laws that would protect American children by withdrawing government funding from abortion providers. She has worked against protecting young American women from predatory abortion practices by voting “no” on legislation that would restrict interstate abortion availability to minors. Wasserman Schultz, like any compassionate human being, is appalled by the use of chemical weapons on children. But she has created a false dichotomy by working to ensure that American babies can be killed by the chemical weapon of a saline abortion, in which a woman’s uterus is filled with a saline solution that eats away at the inside and outside of the baby until it is burned to death in utero. Wasserman Schultz also works to ensure that other babies can be killed by the RU-486 chemical abortion, in which the mother ingests a pill that cuts off her baby’s food supply and starves it to death, before ingesting another pill that makes her uterus contract to expel the dead baby into toilet water, to be flushed out of existence. No one gently dresses these fatally-wounded children in white shrouds, lining them up that we may see and mourn for them, and honor their lives. They are flushed, tossed, and ground out of existence. And yet, the congresswoman rallies for America to go to the aid of a country that is suspected of using chemical weapons on a much smaller scale than that of America’s chemical abortion practice. Human morality demands action in the face of injustice. It also demands consistency in these actions: there are unconnected dots in the congresswoman’s argument that America should rally to aid Syria while simultaneously continuing to snuff out the lives of its own children. PRAY FOR THE SANCTITY OF LIFEI Prayed 1386 Prayers Lord, protect the unborn. For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. Psalm 139:13 O Lord, we thank you for the gift of life. Grant mothers wisdom and courage to choose life for their babies. Turn the hearts of fathers to their children and cover the unborn with your protective hand. "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you…” -Jeremiah 1:5a ________________________________________ Sept 20th
Obama In Full Spin Mode As Syria Says ‘No’ To Keeping Chemical Weapons Deadline Somewhere in the Middle East, right now, Putin and Assad are sharing cigars and cognac around a roaring fire, with the melodious sound of laughter rising into the night sky as they high-five each other over an 8×10 glossy of Obama. ‘Red line’ indeed. WASHINGTON — The ambitious U.S.-Russian deal to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons, hailed as a diplomatic breakthrough just days ago, hit its first delay Wednesday with indications that the Syrian government will not submit an inventory of its toxic stockpiles and facilities to international inspectors by this weekend’s deadline. The State Department signaled that it would not insist that Syrian President Bashar Assad produce the list Saturday, the end of a seven-day period spelled out in the framework deal that Washington and Moscow announced last weekend in Geneva. Read more... _______________________________________ War in Syria, Slaughter of Christians by radical Islamists, Drone Strikes, Abortion, Benghazi
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